


One Night at the Start of December

by Kate88



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: Better late than never?, F/M, First Kiss, How many things is it possible to get wrong?, It was canon when I started, Post-Lethal White, Set Pre-Troubled Blood, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unseasonal fic, teeny tiny bit of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 6,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26798095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kate88/pseuds/Kate88
Summary: Robin and Max throw a 'Start of December' party.
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Comments: 62
Kudos: 69





	1. Christmas 2012

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this before Troubled Blood was published, and have been dithering about what to do with it since. It's gone through a couple of different permutations since then (hence the occasionally bonkers tenses). I decided in the end to leave it pretty much as is, for nostalgia purposes. Also, I found it funny how badly wrong I went on some things (Strike's present-giving abilities mainly). The chapters are different lengths, for reasons that will quickly become apparent. Posted as a one-er for you to binge and so that I can stop tweaking.

**Christmas 2012**

Exhausted, laden with the emotional wreckage from the year, Robin had entered its last month feeling wrung-out and paper thin; unable to fathom how she was going to muster the energy for an Ellacott Christmas (all those people; all that noise) when all she wanted to do was sleep. ‘So why don’t you?’ her counsellor had asked, and Robin had felt something akin to a revelation. Why didn’t she? She could. She was an adult. She had no obligations. She had a life in London that had nothing to do with Masham. What her mum and dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. So, she had told her fretting parents that she had plans with friends in London and reassured them that she was fine; no it wasn’t because she was worried she’d run into Matt; yes, she would see them in the new year. She had almost told her friends that she was going to Yorkshire, but Strike had asked her about what leave she was going to take over the holiday and had fixed her with the same raised eyebrow he used for their less truthful clients when she had fudged her response to the question.

“Okay fine” she had eventually huffed. “I want to spend this year by myself. This whole year has been…and I need to know I can do it. Be alone. And anyway, I’m knackered. I just want to drink Bailey’s, eat some posh Marks and Spencer’s biscuits, watch crap TV and sleep for a week without people asking me if I’m okay every twenty minutes”.

He hadn’t argued, and on reflection, she had realised that he of all people could surely empathise with the need for quiet contemplation. He had made one, mild suggestion that she could spend Christmas Day with him at Nick and Ilsa’s, nodded when she turned the invitation down and hadn’t pressed her on the subject again. They had closed the office early on the twenty-third and gone to The Tottenham for drinks. 

It had been a slightly strange afternoon; she’d thought at the time. Lingering moments of quiet followed by awkward interruptions. Once or twice she had caught him looking at her whilst she waited at the bar for another round, something unreadable in his expression. Wryly, she had wondered if he had caught a similar expression on her face when she had taken advantage of his moments of inattention to survey him. Occasionally she thought his hand had strayed to the left pocket of his enormous coat, but whatever was concealed there had remained hidden. The whole afternoon had made her glad that she’d turned down the invitation of Christmas with the Herbert’s. She had been tired enough, without trying to interpret every loaded silence between her and her partner.

They had parted ways at Tottenham Court Road station later that evening. “Call if you change your mind” he’d instructed gently, pulling her in for a brief hug and kissing her cheek in an unprecedented show of festive cheer.

“I won’t, but thanks anyway. Tell Nick and Ilsa Happy Christmas from me”.

Her cheek had tingled with the scratch of that kiss the whole way home.

She wasn’t all that surprised when he’d called, late on Christmas Night. “Are you on third pudding, or a cheeseboard?” she had greeted him.

“We’re half-way down a bottle of whisky, Ilsa’s about to get Trivial Pursuit out and Nick’s making turkey sandwiches. How was your day?”

They had chatted for several minutes. He had laughed when she told him she’d written up some notes for their latest surveillance case in between mince pies and Quality Street.

“What are you doing now?” he’d asked, and she had found the click of his lighter and the inhalation of a cigarette at the end of the line comforting. On Octavia Street, Strike was smoking on the Herbert’s patio. Despite her unusual day, the world outside spun on as normal.

“Another mince pie and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’”.

“Ah. The world’s worst festive film”.

“I like it” she had said simply, shaking her head. “It’s hopeful”.

“Right” he’d groaned eventually. “Ilsa’s summoning me in. See you in a few days”.

“Merry Christmas Cormoran”.

“Merry Christmas, Robin”.

After they had hung up, she had poured herself a glass of wine and settled down in front of the film. She had done it. The worst year of her life was almost over. She had survived a knife attack, the break-up of her marriage, a panic disorder, being held at gunpoint. She had spent Christmas alone, and hadn’t hated every minute of it. The familiar year-end hush hung in the air and with it the promise of better days on the horizon. 

And he had called. For reasons she cared not to examine too closely, this last thought warmed her insides. It was…nice. They were friends, he had probably been worried. She would have been worried about him if their roles were reversed. She would have called him.

Of course he had called.


	2. December 2013- 8pm- 9pm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The One Where Kate Drastically Misjudged Strike's Thoughtful Present-Giving Abilities.

“I thought you said it wasn’t a Christmas party”, he grumbled when she swung the door open.

Through the heavily frosted glass window of her Earl’s Court flat-share he had watched her bounce up the hallway, thinking idly that he hadn’t seen her bounce since the early days of the Landry investigation, when she had keenly wandered London with him. At the time, he had assumed that it was the first flush of her engagement that had put the buoyant skip in her step. 

She was wearing a bloody stupid jumper; a cartoon Rudolph entangled in fairy lights and he was forced to wonder again, as he had been doing regularly over the course of the last six months, how it was possible that she looked almost completely the same and yet entirely different. Same rose-gold hair. Same blue-grey eyes. She had gained back some of the weight that the combination of wedding preparation and marital woes had rid her of in the preceding year, and the prominent dark circles under her eyes, that he had once convinced himself indicated a pregnancy and the death of their friendship, had receded. Recently though, she carried herself differently. In the run up to her separation from Matthew she’d seemed to grow slightly smaller every time he saw her, slumping further and further into herself under the weight of domestic discontent. At some point in the last year however, her back had straightened, her shoulders had set, and she walked with a new confidence, one that Strike recognised as being born of purpose. She looked, he realised with a degree of melancholy, more her own age than she had done since the day they had first met. He on the other hand, after three nights of surveillance in a row, was feeling every day of his forty years. 

“Would you have come if you’d known?” she asked with a raised brow. 

“Maybe I would have liked the chance to dress for the occasion” he grinned, nodding at the ridiculous jumper. She grinned back and stepped aside so he could hang up his coat.

“Before you go in, this is for you”. He had dug through the pockets and held out a clumsily wrapped package.

“Thought we weren’t doing presents”. She regarded him with an arched eyebrow.

“We weren’t” he conceded. “But I accidentally found the email confirming your order from Colwith Farm Distillery when I was looking for those surveillance photos the other day”.

Robin rolled her eyes. “It was a spur of the moment thing. I was just intrigued- didn’t think West Country malt was a thing”.

“Well, don’t get too excited about this”. He gestured vaguely with the present. “I had to pay Danny to do all the IT updates this week. Your real gift is a computer that doesn’t crash when you try to do the accounts. Gonna put the beer in the fridge”.

She nodded and he moved past her, his frame impossibly big in the cramped confines of the hallway. She heard him greet Vanessa and Max as he wandered into the living room, bag of Doom Bar clinking by his side.

Taking advantage of the solitude, she slipped her fingers between the tape and the Thomas the Tank Engine wrapping he had used and revealed the package’s contents, the air leaving her lungs in a surprised exhalation. Under the alarmingly cheerful paper was a plain, dark picture frame holding five scraps of paper. On the first- _‘you find it, I’ll pay for it’_ \- printed in Strike’s spikey cramped handwriting. The remaining four were notes written in her own considerably neater hand; a combination of post-its and whatever must have been available at the time. A telephone message taken in the early days of the Lula Landry case. An observation on Bombyx Mori. A post-it left on her desk for Strike during the Shackelwell Ripper investigation. A note written for Izzy in her guise of Venetia Hall. Why and how he had retained these things in the first place was one question. When he would have had the time to find and collate each fragment, let alone have them framed, when they had been so busy was another. Robin had the distinct feeling that examining the potential answers to these questions too closely would greatly disturb the precarious sense of equilibrium she put some effort into maintaining when it came to her work partner.

Whatever his thinking, it was the best present she had ever received. The enormity of its meaning belied by its simplicity. A permanent record of her progress- from unwanted temporary secretary to full partner and skilled investigator. Matthew had been an extravagant giver of gifts; enormous flower arrangements sent to whatever office she had been working in over Valentine’s Day, her birthday, their anniversary. Jewellery. Perfume. Beautiful things she hadn’t been able to justify spending her own money on. Latterly she had come to realise that, like his fixation with her low-paid job and desperation to be seen living in a desirable area of the city, his giving of expensive gifts had been as much about appearance as the thought and affection behind them.

Scrunching the paper into a ball in her hand, she wandered into the living room, where Strike and Vanessa were deep in conversation. She caught his eye as she entered and shook her head, gesturing ever-so-slightly to where the frame was held in her hand. She might have imagined it, it could just as easily have been an effect of the heat that was building up in the small room, but she could have sworn his cheeks were slightly pink as he gave her a brief nod and returned to his conversation.


	3. 9pm- 11pm

He’d surprised himself by actually enjoying the evening. He’d remembered the last party that Robin had thrown, and how much he’d disliked her- Matthew’s- friends. Obnoxious and braying, their conversations had seemed to be focussed mostly on their opportunities for promotion, how hard it was to find suitable property in London and the rugby. On that evening, he’d looked around the crowd and wondered how much any of them actually liked each other. 

Tonight however, he savoured the warmth emanating from the crowd of people brought together through their mutual affection for the two people who lived in the Earl’s Court flat.  


Barclay and Hutchins had spent their evening taking the piss out of each and Strike. Hutchins drank ginger beer, but Barclay, free from domestic responsibilities for the night, got more drunk than Strike had imagined possible in such a short period of time.

He’d had an interesting chat with Vanessa about changes to the Met’s policies regarding working with private investigators, the ramifications of which he’d decided to think about on Monday.

Max had introduced himself and had drawn him into a conversation with some of his friends, spending ten minutes confiding in him about what an excellent flatmate Robin was and how awful his break-up with his ex-boyfriend had been. His friends had asked him interesting questions about private investigation and the army and shared entertaining stories about the West End play they were currently rehearsing. 

He’d brought enough beer, there was a table of snacks that had included home-made sausage rolls and Nick was sharing a bottle of Talisker. It was as different as possible to his normal Saturday night, but he found he hadn’t minded about missing the football and he hadn’t thought at all about their current cases.  


It hadn’t hurt that every so often, he had looked up, seeking out Robin in the crowd, to find her watching him with a smile on her face.

**************************

She was giddy. Drunk on both the excellent mulled wine Max had prepared and the sensation of something else. It was like the first days of spring after the endless stretch of a bleak Yorkshire winter. The first daffodils in the hedgerow at the bottom of her parent’s garden bloomed in early March and on the first fine Sunday after their emergence, the Ellacotts would walk the path by the river, following it as it diverged and climbed the limestone hill behind Masham. They would reach the top before lunch and, perched on the stone wall whilst they drank hot tea from a Thermos, roll their eyes as her dad sighed “God’s own country”. She and her brothers would race back down the hill with the barely warm sun on their backs, feet flying through damp grass, lungs filled with fresh air and faces pink from exertion by the time they reached the bottom. She remembered those days, the freedom and possibility of them. Now, on a Saturday evening in London, at the start of the festive season, surrounded by people who were her friends and not just people inherited from Matthew, Robin could feel in her veins the same crackle of those March days. 

She had giggled on the couch, telling Ilsa she really shouldn’t have another glass of prosecco as her friend topped her up and forced the glass into her hand. Nobody minded that she was pissed, in fact they actively encouraged it. Nobody would tell her off for it tomorrow morning.

Barclay had drunkenly slurred that she was _seriously impressive, hen._

She and Max had stood beside each other, basking in the glow of a successful evening’s hosting. She’d praised his sausage rolls. He’d thrilled over her music selection. The two of them conspiratorially agreed that they threw an excellent party. 

It hadn’t hurt that when she had occasionally looked up, wondering if Strike was having a terrible evening, she found him looking at her, his eyes twinkling merrily in the fairy lights.


	4. 11:00pm- 11:30pm

Beside Nick, Ilsa was vibrating with excitement.

“Look. Look!” she hissed in his ear, poking his arm as he topped up both their glasses. “He did it again”.

“Ilsa” he groaned, passing her the wine glass and shaking his head. “Leave them alone”.

“But it’s so exciting” she protested with a pout. “She keeps looking at him. He keeps looking at her. There’s fairy-lights and candles. I feel like we’re in a Richard Curtis film”.

Nick laughed, slinging an arm over her shoulders.

“And you’re the over-invested best friend” he scolded.

“You could be more invested”. 

“I am invested. I’m completely invested. I just don’t want our investedness to scare them off each other”.

“’Investedness’? You get to be a surgeon these days with that piss-poor command of the English language?” she teased.


	5. 11:30pm- 12:00am

He’d told himself before he’d arrived that he would stay no more than two hours, but his self-imposed home-time had been and gone, and he felt no great desire to leave the party. He had been standing in the kitchen by himself, in the process of opening another bottle of Doom Bar and snaffling a handful of crisps from the bag that had been left open on the counter, when Robin had wandered in, wearing a grin that made his heart lurch.

“Hiya” she greeted him, leaning against the kitchen counter opposite. “Haven’t seen you all evening. Are you having an okay time?”

“Max’s sausage rolls are helping” he chuckled, with a wink.

She topped up her tumbler from the pan steaming lightly on the hob. He clinked his bottle against her glass and they drank for moment, the quiet broken by the raucous sound of laughter from the other room.

“Thank you. For the present” she said eventually.

“You were supposed to get it last year” he admitted. “But I thought it was maybe a bit too soon to be giving you things that might remind you how much your ex hated your job”.

“Well, I love it. Best present ever”. She kept her eyes on his face longer than was strictly necessary. 

Strike shifted, suddenly conscious of the space between them. This sudden change of atmosphere between them happened more and more frequently. One second everything was perfectly normal; they would be eating lunch, making cups of tea, catching up on the day’s work. The following second there was a fizz in the air, an indefinable change that rendered one, or both, of them incapable of speaking in more than single syllables. 

In the spirit of the frank conversation they'd had at the races, the week after Robin had left Matthew, they had succeeded- for the most part- in bringing a new honesty to their business relationship. Robin had a standing weekly appointment blocked out in their diary for counselling appointments. Sometimes she talked to him about her sessions. He knew now about the occasional nightmares; ones from which she awoke grasping at invisible hands round her throat. He knew that she found the acute onset of her anxiety and those nightmares harder to control when she was tired and that as well as disliking people standing behind her, she couldn’t bear concrete stairwells. In return, he had shared the experience of waking in an army hospital in Germany, an intense itch in a foot no longer attached to his leg. He told her about the many, many months it had been before he was able to climb into a taxi without hyperventilating and the strange sensation of being treated by almost everyone he knew as if he was suddenly not who he had been before, whittling down his social circle until all that was left was Nick, Ilsa, Dave Polworth and Shanker. 

Despite everything they had shared in the fifteen months since the dissolution of Robin’s marriage, he knew that they were both conscious of things unsaid, and unsayable, between them. He knew that it was in those fizzing awkward silences between them that those things lay. 

_Leave with me. Come back with me. Please._

_This was a mistake._

_You’re not happy. I know you’re not happy._

_Stop being so reckless…stop taking such bloody stupid chances…I can’t bear it._

He couldn’t tell her that if someone were ever to ask him how he had known that his feelings towards her had changed, he wouldn’t be able to tell them exactly. No thunderclap. No bolt of lightning. No storm metaphor of any kind, actually. Instead- tiny increments, almost imperceptible shifts, like sand slipping down a dune. Gradually, and then all at once.

Almost nothing, and then a bloody revelation.

That miserable autumn day after their lunch with Izzy and Billy, as they had wandered back along the Thames, they had made plans to have dinner with Nick and Ilsa. He had wondered at the time, as he walked away from her with a smile on his face, if that was how it felt to be at the beginning of things. But that had been over a year ago and between the agency’s steady caseload, their new sub-contractors and Robin’s divorce proceedings, the imagined promise of that day had dissipated like morning mist. In its place remained only a constant, undeniable hum which underscored every conversation- mundane or meaningful- with yet another unsayable thing.

_What if what if what if what if._


	6. 12:00am- 12:05am

Robin wasn’t sure what possessed her, but suspected it was the culmination of the twinkling lights, the festive music and the liberal application of wine and prosecco. 

She’d liked the way he looked, leaning on the counter opposite her with the sleeves on his smart shirt rolled up, grinning broadly at the story she’d been telling with the corners of his eyes crinkling the way they did when he was genuinely amused. Without being totally aware of what she was doing- she wasn’t even particularly aware of having had the thought- she kissed him. As if it were something she did every day- something entirely normal, just because he’d looked nice in the moment. Her lips met his and he tasted like cigarette smoke, chilled air and whisky and she wondered, briefly, why they hadn’t been doing this all along.


	7. 12:05am- 1:00am

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Get a cuppa and settle in.

Strike had been thinking about this moment since their shared embrace on the stairs during her utterly shambolic wedding day. He had, in his weaker moments, allowed himself to imagine how they would get to this point. He’d squashed down elaborate daydreams of an adrenaline fuelled moment of peril, reconciling himself with more prosaic imaginings- the office on Denmark Street, after hours, the end of a difficult job. The Tottenham after one too many on a Friday night. Walking each other back to the Tube after curry night on Octavia Street. Ego had encouraged him to believe that it would be him who eventually took the situation in hand, and that Robin would have no objections when he did.

Faced with a reality quite different to his late-night musings, he hesitated. Robin jerked back as if she had been burned.

“Come on”. He grabbed her hand and steered her out of the open French doors, into the tiny shared courtyard.

“Sorry”, she mumbled. Her hand was over her mouth and her cheeks were pink. “That was…Too much wine. Sorry”.

She had been drinking mulled wine all evening and she had tasted like cinnamon. Her cheeks were pink, she had felt warm and solid as she’d leaned against him and he had wanted nothing more than to kiss her back. But when he looked at her, at the tiny crease between her eyebrows, suggestive of intense concentration, he felt he could see the next ten months laid out before them. Each and every mistake, argument and pitfall and it’s precise timing; completely inexorable. The exciting first flush with its glowing cheeks, giddy smiles and weekends in bed. She’d stay the night in his tiny flat and he would make her tea in the morning. She might leave a book on the floor, and for the first time since Charlotte, he wouldn’t see it as an encroachment into his solitary way of life. She’d go out to get them breakfast and she wouldn’t judge him for requesting four bacon rolls because she never tried to change him.

But then- _because isn't there always a ‘but’?_ \- he’d start worrying about her more than he already did. Start feeling that same sickening helplessness he’d had when he’d heard her attacked on the other end of the phone more and more often. He’d keep her out of dangerous work and find reasons for her to stay on infidelity cases and Christ, how she’d resent that. There would be a fight and he would shut her out because wasn’t that what he always did? Maybe they’d make up for a while, but the echoes of the hurtful things they had said to each other would linger. The agency would stay busy and he would take on a bit more than his knee was capable of handling, ending each day grey with pain and too worried about not being able to stop yet another horrible thing happening to Robin to talk to her honestly. She would worry about him in return and he would feel that same creeping sense of claustrophobia he always did when he couldn’t have things entirely on his own terms. Eventually, having already put up with more than enough shitty behaviour in her previous romantic relationship, Robin would leave. She would have too much respect for herself to stay, even if leaving would break her heart. Strike credited himself with enough awareness to realise that Robin leaving would break some part of him for the rest of his life. 

He understood, with perfect clarity, that this was how it would happen. This was how the mingling of their professional and personal lives would erode everything until all that was left was a mess of anger, silence and resentment. He would lose his business and his friend, and it would be almost entirely his own fault, because it always was. His self-reliance, stoicism and stubbornness had been the undoing of every promising relationship he’d had.

“Actually, no”. Robin’s voice snapped him out of his train of thought. Her Yorkshire vowels were slightly broader than normal, a sure sign that she was drunk. He tried hard to notice this objectively instead of finding it endearing. “No, I’m not sorry. Unless you really didn’t want me to, in which case I am. But even then, I’m not really sorry. Sorry not sorry”.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea Robin” he mumbled. “In fact, it’s a bloody terrible one”.

“Oh thanks. What makes you say that?”

“Because it’s you, Robin. It’s you and it’s me and I’m your boss and it’s…unseemly”.

He had been prepared for her hurt. For tears or, even worse, quiet acceptance in the face of rejection. He had wondered, when playing out all the different ways that this could happen, if she would yell at him. 

Whatever he had been expecting her reaction to be, he had not imagined it would be laughter. There she was though, leaning against the pebble dashed wall with her face tilted skywards, laughing as if he had just told her a particularly good joke. 

“You’ve never used the word ‘unseemly’ before in your life” she chuckled, wiping her eyes and smudging her mascara in the process.

“Well, it would be. Abuse of power. Plus, you really are pissed” he said wryly. 

She shrugged. “I won’t be pissed tomorrow. And I’m your partner, not your employee”.

“Robin…” he sighed.

“No, listen” she interrupted. “Yes, I am drunk. But you’ve had seven bottles and at least two glasses of Nick’s whisky so you are too, and I don’t see another way to do this, do you? Because we can talk about PTSD flashbacks and awful exes and if the BMW can go one more MOT and new surveillance equipment from here ‘till bloody Kingdom come, but God forbid we talk about our _feelings_. So if we don’t do it now, when do we?” 

He stayed quiet. He had known for a long time that she was braver than he was.

“Did you really want me not to kiss you?”

A sound like water rushing in his ears. The intense feeling that he was outside his body or watching a play. This was not real; could not be happening because whenever he had mused about this conversation over his morning cigarette, he always knew exactly what to say. He had indisputable, insurmountable arguments. 

“You can tell me if you didn’t. I’m a big girl. I know I’m not really your type. I can take it if you don’t wa-…”

“It’s all I bloody think about” he interrupted, because the idea that she thought he didn’t want her was almost as unbearable as the idea of not kissing her back.  


“I’ve been thinking about it since the Chiswell case last year. Probably earlier if we’re really getting into things. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean it can happen”. A feeling inside; the creaking of floodgates tightly closed, a small trickle of truth and he knew he had just enough beer to turn it into a torrent.

“Why not?”

“You’re still married for one thing”.

“Not for much longer. And you don’t give a shit about Matt”. Objectively he pondered that she really must be quite angry at him if she was swearing.  


“I’m older than you. Gonna be forty next year- that’s over ten years”.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly retiring tomorrow. Besides…I’ve felt ancient since I was eighteen”.

“We work together. We work well together. We’ve worked fuckin’ hard to turn the agency into a viable prospect for more than one person to make a living off. It’s fucked when we fuck up”.

“Have you always been this much of a pessimist?” she retorted.

“Fine” he barked. “You’re right. I don’t give a shit about your divorce. Matthew’s a prick and it would be bloody hilarious if the thing he gave you so much grief about ended up being true”. 

Robin rolled her eyes, struck out of the blue by a conversation with an ancient great-aunt, years before she had been old enough to understand what the embittered older woman was talking about. _All the bloody same._ Even this one, who was so different. Strike was still talking though, clicking his lighter over and over again in a show of nerves so uncharacteristic that she almost took pity on him and stopped the conversation in its tracks. But he was still talking, each sentence barrelling into the last.

“And yeah, all right we do work together but maybe we’d be professional enough to handle it if things went to shit. We have so many fucking sub-contractors these days we’d probably never have to see each other anyway. But Robin, you got _married_. You married a complete dickhead because that’s what you want. Someone your own age. A decent marriage. A nice house with a nice dog and nice kids. Brunch. Sundays in museums. I can’t give you that”.

Silence. Ringing, deafening silence. He hated her silence. It usually meant that the next time she spoke, she would have an argument that would beat his hands down.

“You know” she said mildly, after a considerable pause. “Matt used to try and tell me what I wanted too. He was always banging on about how I wanted a nice beach holiday, or a car that would be easier to park in London or a job with reasonable hours so I could spend time with him”.

He nodded. She had confided in him about this aspect of their relationship before.

“I didn’t think that you were like that”.

“I’m not…” And now he was angry because he was capable of being many shitty things, but he was not prepared to accept the charge of being _like_ Matthew Cunliffe.

“Do you think it would be possible for _me_ to decide what I want? Where I live? What I do with my own uterus? You’re a bloody detective Cormoran. How has it escaped your notice that I’ve just spent a year leaving an identical situation to the one you just described?”

“Fuck sake” he rubbed a hand over his face in exasperation. “All I meant was…You deserve someone…someone…whole. In every sense of the word Robin. Someone who can give you what you want. ‘Cause fuck knows, you deserve better than a bad-tempered, one-legged fat old bastard who cares more about his job than basically anything else”. And there it was, he thought, defiantly lighting a cigarette to avoid her steady blue-grey eyes. The messiest edges of himself. The ones that she had probably guessed at but could have no real idea of the depths of. If that didn’t send her running for the hills, he was out of ideas.

She snorted, and for a second, Strike worried she might laugh again. 

“Well I don’t want ‘brunch’”. Her grey-blue eyes were twinkling.

“And I hate museums. Especially the ones in London. Too many school trips. You can never get close to any of the good stuff”.

“Philistine”. 

She left her spot on the wall, wincing slightly as she moved stiff joints and came to stand in front of him.

“Look” she said, meeting his eyes and trying not to look away even though the intensity of his gaze made her stomach clench. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last couple of years it’s that I haven’t had a clue about what I want for ages. Not since uni. Not since…I probably still don’t”.

She was so calm. He couldn’t help remembering the blistering arguments he and Charlotte had endured. Fights that had left dents in plaster, glasses broken, nerves shredded. Fights that had lasted days, if not weeks, and left them hollow and clinging to each other. 

She gestured back and forth in the fraction of empty space between them.

“But this- this is _something_ Cormoran, isn’t it? I don’t think I’m wrong about that”.

“No, you’re not. But…”

“Oh for Christ sake, I’m not asking you to marry me” she said, and for the first time she sounded exasperated. “I’m just saying…couldn’t we give it a go?”

Strike knew two things about himself to be true. The first was that he was a clever man. He couldn’t have read Classics at Oxford if he wasn’t clever. He would not have been promoted to SIB if he wasn’t clever. There was no way he could have set up, sustained and grown his own private investigation business in the grubby heart of London if he wasn’t clever. 

The second thing he was aware of was his occasionally enormous capacity for stupidity; his bloody stupid choices. Dropping out of the university he had worked so hard to get into. Shagging Charlotte the first night they met. Every time he had ever left her, and then returned, believing that there had been some fundamental shift in their relationship. 

A clever man with a track record of stupid choices. 

Was this one of them though?

_Have you always been this much of a pessimist?_

Despite everything, he could feel his resolve slipping. He had never considered himself a pessimist before. A realist, absolutely. He held no illusions about the crap ways in which people could treat those they loved. He was well aware that his own behaviour over the last few years had been far from blameless. He realised though, that he hated the idea that Robin thought him pessimistic. The realist in him was gently insisting that it yes, it could go all wrong. _But what if it didn’t?_

What if there was just as much chance that it could work out. He _could_ bring her tea in bed. She _could_ get him breakfast. Maybe it didn’t all have to go to shit. 

_What if what if what if what if._

What he was completely sure about was that they were both tired of _this_. Tired of the awkward dance between them. Tired of loaded silences. Tired of over-thinking everything they said to each other in case they gave away too much. Tired of over-thinking everything the other had said, trying to work out how much had been given away.

They could finish each other’s sentences. They found any opportunity lean over each other’s desks. He had found himself hoping for a case that would necessitate a long drive out of London in the ancient, rattling Land Rover. He had the feeling of standing at a precipice and knowing a jump was necessary, even desirable, but being unable to take the step that would see him tumble over the edge. 

Slowly, as if she were a cloud of smoke that would drift away the second he tried to catch it, he took each of her hands in his. He looked down at them and watched her fingers interlace with his. He wondered if she was aware that she was holding her breath. 

“Cormoran…”

“Sssh” he cut her off gently. There was magic in this moment and he wanted to commit it to memory. The moment he was brave. The moment everything between them changed.

She grinned and he kissed her. He cupped her face in his hands, running his thumbs over her cheekbones, trying to pour as much feeling as he could into it. Her arms looped round his back and held him in place. She made a tiny noise, somewhere between a sigh and a mewl and ran her tongue over his lips.

After a couple of minutes, they broke apart. Robin was breathing rapidly, twin spots of colour high on her cheeks and a smirk on her lips.

“Nice of you to catch up”.

“Shut up Ellacott” he mumbled, pulling her to him and holding her tightly.

She beamed up at him, rising onto tiptoes to kiss him again.


	8. 1:05am- 1:10am

“Nick!”

Ilsa emerged at Nick’s side, interrupting the story that Barclay had been regaling them with and seized his arm.

“Can you come with me a minute?” Nick knew his wife well enough to know that what had been posed as a request was, in fact, a command.

She dragged him into the kitchen and pointed to the window over the sink.

“Look!”

Nick looked out the window, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for his friend. It was just…he felt there were some things friends didn’t need to know about each other, he thought. Like their liberal use of tongue or the exact placement of their hands on the object of their affection’s arse.

He looked at Ilsa, who was beaming happily beside him.

“Now it really feels like we’re in a Richard Curtis film” she said, with a satisfied nod.


	9. The Next Day- 11am

Robin woke up late, her head spinning from mixing red wine, prosecco and whisky and her face sore for more enjoyable reasons. She smiled to herself as she remembered the rasp of his stubble against her skin. They had enjoyed an increasingly frantic half hour in the courtyard before deciding they had probably been absent from the party long enough.

She had squeezed his hand before they had gone back inside, where they had promptly taken up opposite sides of the living room. Barclay had coughed. Ilsa had grinned more broadly than Robin had ever seen before. Nick had rolled his eyes.

She had the distinct feeling they had been rumbled.

Her phone buzzed beside her.

“Morning” he greeted her when she picked up. “Sore head?”

“Not up yet. Haven’t been able to assess the damage”.

He chuckled. “Fancy grabbing something to eat when you do emerge?”

“Yes please. Give me an hour to get tidied up a bit. Meet you at the office?”

They hung up and she allowed herself ten more minutes under her duvet, until she heard the hoover in the other room.

“Good party” Max greeted her as she wandered into the living room and began clearing bottles and glasses.

“Yeah, it was” she agreed, feeling her cheeks turn pink at his raised eyebrow and sly smile.

“That’s the nice thing about Christmas. All that good cheer in the air”.

Robin mildly agreed that yes, that was a nice thing about Christmas, before retreating to her room to get dressed. The stupid jumper flashed weakly at her from its crumpled pile on the floor.

**On my way** she texted as she closed the door behind her.

His response came less than five seconds later **Can’t wait.**

He was waiting for her outside the office and greeted her with a toe-curling kiss. His nose was cold, and the smell of cigarette smoke clung to his coat. She wondered briefly how it managed to suit him, when on anyone else it would be off-putting to say the least.

“Hi” he grinned when they separated.

“Hi” she breathed back.

“Hair of the dog?” he asked, as they started sauntering up Denmark Street. He held her hand in his. Funny, she hadn’t anticipated him being a hand-holder.

“Oh God” she groaned. “I might need to start with a Coke”.

He chuckled, and she noticed they were heading towards the Tottenham.

“Seemed uh…fitting”. He squeezed her hand a little tighter.

Feeling slightly dream-like; a combination of hangover and the heady feeling of her cold hand tucked inside his enormous warm one, Robin found herself suddenly struggling for something- anything- to say. 

“Relax” he mumbled, holding open the door to the pub.

She watched him from their usual table in the corner as he limped up to the bar and chatted with Eddie. This is it she realised. This was the start of it all. Whatever ‘all’ turned out to be. And it was exciting and terrifying and joyous and about a hundred other feelings she couldn’t put name to. She wondered if he was feeling the same. _No excuse not to ask him now_ the smug little voice inside her head whispered.

He sat down opposite her, depositing a Coke and a pint and they drank quietly, their eyes meeting occasionally before skittering away to take in their surroundings, familiar but rendered new by the previous night.

Eventually, when he was half a pint down, Robin cleared her throat. There were things she wanted to ask. Questions she needed answered. He beat her to it.

“So, what are you doing for Christmas this year?”

He was beaming at her, his eyes crinkled and dancing and whatever it was she had been going to ask- her memory rendered temporarily unreliable by the expression on his face- could wait. She reached across the table and tucked her hand around his.

“I’m not sure. I had planned to go back to Masham”.

He nodded.

“But that can probably change”.


End file.
